Throughout his ten year career, the filmmaker and artist Narvir Singh (Punjabi, b. 1989 London, UK) has collaborated with key figures from a range of creative disciplines, experimenting with the relationship between poetry, visual art, music and theatre.

Lose Yourself: a wedding parody

Look, if you had, one shot, one opportunity, to have a wedding that everybody else wanted, spend over the odds, would you do it, or would you save your money?

[VERSE 1]

Yo
He’s scared and fretting
Head hurts, starts regretting
Thinks back to life before
Planning this wedding
He’s in love
But now he’s in Armageddon
No joke
So much
That he keeps on forgetting
He makes lists
But writes them on palms and wrists
He has one wish:
Eternal marital bliss
Oh and this:
A wedding with a twist
No twists, no
This wedding fantasy
I’ll make it a reality
I’ll make it happen, see
I’m raiding fam’s treasury
Spending pounds blindly
Buying lots’a gold jewellery
It doesn’t really matter,
Recoup it in dowry
Hoping my family will be proud of me
Cuz my father looks at me and he be smiling and grinning
He be living life like he be winning
I live a lie, cuz it is patriarchal
Got material wealth but that’s just partial

[CHORUS]

You better kill yourself when you’re shaadi-planning weddings,
have got no bloody soul?
You gotta spend mom dad dough like ya never before, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime
You better…

[VERSE 1]

Ring and earring sets
Keeping up appearances
Necklaces blessed with the incense
Like a King
My bling shining brightly
My face had whitening
Man, it might be unsightly
Maiyan’d up nicely
Cuz we do it rightly
Just to look fly-ly
I spent so many days,
trying on Sherwanis
In Hounslow n Wembley
Colours match entirely
meri dill di rani
Her lengha, lakh and senthi
Coordinated, travel with her flying
Helicopter, Rolls and Bentleys, we styling
Land near Gurdwara, n drop notes while I’m in
Cause I’ll make sure that my bloodline will win
I can’t see how I could’a over glossed this
Prices made up, on how much it cost-ed
Starting our lives from the committee office

[CHORUS]

You better kill yourself when you’re shaadi-planning weddings,
have got no bloody soul?
You gotta spend mom dad dough like ya never before, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime
You better…

[VERSE 3]

Cards mailed, date set, then, re-thought the number again
Added to the list of invitations sent
Guest-list of one thousand, now a thousand and ten
Had to make some more room for my friend’s friends
Got a separate marquee for the kids who are coming
Spent a few gees man it’s gonna look stunning!
I dropped more dough than we did on dwelling
Tried to get Buck Palace but they weren’t receipting
Now I be stressing, with those who be inspecting me
Saying I live like I forgot the ten Gs
I be living life for me
It’s not ego
It’s getting bigger and bigger
I Spent the figures
You look at me like he can go figure
How many hundreds of zeros I spent
And in the end I don’t know where it went
Spent too long on planning this viyaah
It’s just one day, but marriage is forever
Shoulda worked on understanding laavan
All for someone else’s ‘baleh baleh shava’
Cos living for you, life gets harder
Money wasted on venue and the open bar
Wedding day won’t help me and my wife go far
soul stolen
But It shoulda been my heart

[CHORUS]

You better kill yourself when you’re shaadi-planning weddings,
have got no bloody soul?
You gotta spend mom dad dough like ya never before, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime
You better…

[OUTRO]

You see
You can make it happen
However, you might need it to be
Whether you need to
beat the marquee or
Tell family that
They’ve had their wedding
Whether you can break out of their webbing
to do what you need to do
is your challenge
keep your life simple
maybe buy a house
a car
maybe that will help you go far
instead of this